Stanley Elkin - The Franchiser

“We can garnishee—”

“What? What can we garnishee? Their unemployment checks? Their workman’s compensation? What can we garnishee? Their allowance from the union? What, what can we garnishee? The widow’s mite? The plastic collateral? What can we garnishee? We going to play tug-of-war with the dealer to repossess the car? We take their furniture? Their color TV? And do what? We got a warehouse? We got storage facilities? Tracts of land in the desert for all the mothball fleet of a bankrupt’s detritus? Credit checks! On what? Old times? The good old days? It doesn’t make you suspicious white-collar guys come to you for dough? College graduates? The class of ’58? That doesn’t bother you? Your ear ain’t to the ground? Take your credit checks in the men’s toilet. Hear what they’re saying in those circles. Sneak up behind them where they eat their lunch, taking their sandwiches from a paper bag, their milk from mayonnaise jars, because these are the people never owned a lunch pail, a pencil box of food, who wouldn’t recognize a thermos unless it was beside a Scotch cooler on a checkered cloth spread out on the lawn for a picnic. Fuck your credit checks, cancel them they bounce. Overhear the rumors they overhear — the layoffs, the open-ended furloughs coming just after the Christmas upswing, the plants closing down in this industry and that, and only a skeleton crew to bank the furnaces, only the night-watchman industry booming because we live in the time of the looters, of the plate-glass smashers, in the age of the plucked toaster from the storefront window and somebody else snitches the white bread. This is the credit you’re running down? No no. They won’t pay. They can’t. And they don’t care.”

“But so far…”

“Sure so far, certainly so far. So far is no distance at all. I’m shutting us down, I’m getting us out. Even now I am negotiating with banks and savings and loans and even with shylocks to buy up our paper at a discount.” Friendly Bob Adams had stopped smiling. It was the first time Flesh had seen him unhappy. It was very strange. His expansiveness gone, he seemed not so much sad as winded. Ben gave him a chance to catch his breath. Adams shook his head slowly. He moved from behind his desk and past the safe where they kept the money and to the window, where he looked out onto the street.

“You’ll find something,” Flesh said. “I tell you what. If nothing turns up you can always come back to me. I’ll find a place for you in a different franchise. I’m not getting out of everything. I’m simply taking stock, inventorying my situation, trimming my sails. Don’t worry. You’ll be all right. I swear to you.”

“It isn’t that,” Adams said.

“It isn’t what?”

“It isn’t that. I wasn’t thinking about myself. I can make it.”

“Sure you can,” Ben said.

“It isn’t me.”

“You’ll be fine.”

“Sure,” he said. He looked stricken.

“What is it?”

“Miss Lapaloosa,” he said. “You know me, Ben,” he said, “my make-up. I’m sunshine soldier, summer patriot.”

“Yes?”

“Jean was different. When she turned sourpuss I had to let her go. She depressed me. She tried my friendliness.”

“You want me to fire Miss Lapaloosa? Is that it?”

“You saw,” he said. “That smile. That was from the heart, Ben.”

I put my hand on his shoulder. “I’ll do it,” I said.

“Would you?”

“No problem.”

“That’s swell, Ben. That’s a load off my chest.”

“She’s as good as out on her ass this minute.”

“You’re all right, Ben,” Friendly Bob Adams said.

And giving them the benefit of his best judgment at Railroad Salvage.

“It’s all wrong,” he said, walking with his manager up and down the big hangar-like room, past the bins of canned goods, the stands of steamer trunks and open drawers of hardware — nails, tacks, screws, bits of pipe, washers, bolts, and nuts — like boxes of font, the appliances, mixed, blenders next to portable radios, side by side with steam irons, waffle irons above pressure cookers, toasters and hot plates and bathroom scales laid out on shelves like prizes in a carnival booth. Past the toys, the bins of practical jokes — fake dog poop, joy buzzers, dismembered suppurating fingers, whoopee cushions — like a warehouse of toy pain and joke shit. Through wall-less, shuffled rooms of cheap furniture, kitchen tables set up beside bedroom sets and next to raised toilet seats, vanities, double basins, sinks heavily fixtured as consoles in control towers next to porch furniture, lawn — swings, hammocks, chaise longues, big barbecues like immense cake dishes — beside living rooms that melded into each other, stocky Mediterranean alongside Mapley Colonial and near art-deco Barcaloungers, stack tables, glass and aluminum pieces, a dozen different kinds of lamps. Polyglot as the site of a tornado. “It’s all wrong, it won’t do.”

“Business hasn’t been bad, Mr. Flesh. Sure, the economy’s in a bind right now. Things are a little tight, but our figures are only marginally behind last year’s. Down maybe 7 or 8 percent, but there’ll be an upturn. The President says, his advisers think—”

“It won’t do. Bring a hammer. Get a nail.”

“A hammer? A nail?”

“Have you got a piece of glass somewhere? From costume jewelry. Fetch a zircon.”

“But I—”

“Do it,” Flesh said.

His manager whispered something to a stock boy who was passing by. When the boy returned Flesh took the hammer from him, beckoned them both to follow. The kid caddied Ben’s zircon, his nail.

They returned to the bins of canned goods. Ben set a can of peas down on the cement floor and, stooping, carefully slammed at the top of the can. “See?” he said, holding it up, “now it looks damaged. Hand me the nail. See,” he said, “you make a little scratch on the label. Don’t tear it all off, just a little scratch.” He straightened up. “Here and there. I don’t mean everything. But here and there. Use the zircon to scar the glass tabletops, the legs of coffee tables. Get tools that etch your driver’s license into metal. Burn long numbers on the back of TV sets. They’ll think stolen goods. Be careful. Don’t cut yourself. I don’t want anybody hurt.” He looked at them. “Goodwill Industries is killing us, they’re busting our brains. All right, I’m not really frightened of Mr. Goodwill Industries. Mr. Goodwill Industries is in for a kick in the ass, too. People aren’t so quick in these times to clear out their junk. They’ll make do. They won’t rifle their wardrobes or wring out their basements. Mr. Goodwill Industries is living on borrowed time. His sources are drying up. That’s when we make our move.

“For people need junk,” he said. “There’s a hunger for the secondhand, the used, the abused. I don’t understand this need — me, give me a shiny motel by the side of the road and be a friend to man. But others, our others, the people who come here, there is a flotsam tropism in such people. The jetsam set. A longing deep as lust for the overboard, the castoff, what’s found in the plane wreck, what’s seared in the riot or ruined in the hold. The dead man’s new suit, the suicide’s coat, her shoes and her slip. People want such things. They have a sweet tooth for remnant, for rubbish, remainder. All the derelict and marooned, the ditched and scavenged. Debris, dregs, lees. Dregs addicts. All the multitudinous slag of the ordinary. Is it economy that puts this thirst in them? I don’t know but I don’t think so. I think acquisition, some squirrel vestige in the instincts, something miserly and niggardly, basic but not base, the things of the world as heirloom. The world as heirloom, handed down and continuing. History’s hugged dower. A sort of pin money in the shit in the attic.